Assessing local emergency preparedness using a common assessment tool

Despite the large amounts of federal funds invested over the last few years to improve public health preparedness for response to bioterrorism or other public health emergencies, there are no national criteria for what the ideal preparedness should be for a state or local public health agency jurisdiction. Nor is there consensus about at least the minimum functions that should be available at various levels. Although a wide variety of tools to measure preparedness have been proposed by different organizations, there is no standard system of metrics, no single tool, that has been broadly adopted. There is insufficient evidence from the tools that have been tried to date to determine which assessment approaches and methods work well at local, state, or federal levels. Without a measurement system that can document improvements in preparedness secondary to funding, public health officials cannot satisfy demands for accountability as to the effects of the investment in public health. The purpose of this project is to take advantage of already collected data from three different states where baseline and repeated assessments of local capacity using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Capacity Inventory Tool were performed. These results will assist federal, state, and local officials in the task to develop valid tools, measures, and methods that can assess the level of preparedness across multiple jurisdictions, document improvements, and identify areas to target for further allocations.